She was born as Topsy Jane Legge in Erdington in Birmingham in 1938, the daughter of Anna Maud née Gumbrell (1907-2006) and Albert Harry Legge (1894-1961), a dairy-man and by 1939 a telephone engineer for the GPO.[1] Her father was a committed Communist and later was to be a major influence in the political awakening of her husband, the British film and television producer and actor Tony Garnett.[5] Topsy Jane was educated at Paget Road School before going on to study at Garrett's Green College.[6] Initially, she intended to train as a children's nurse, but while appearing in amateur theatre at the Varley Players at Pype Hayes Church, the Birmingham Drama Group, and the Highbury Little Theatre[7] she realised she had a talent for acting. Her husband, Tony Garnett, later wrote of her:
"Leaving school at fifteen, Topsy was not academic, although she read voraciously, loving Tolstoy and almost any nineteenth-century English or French novel she could lose herself in. We shared a love of poetry. She loved Keats and I liked Shelley. She would listen as I held forth, no doubt pretentiously, on some matter, using ill-digested political jargon. Then she would ask a penetrating, naive question, using simple Anglo-Saxon words, leaving me spluttering. It was done with no edge. Her love was so guileless, so complete, I never doubted it. No one had loved me so totally since I was five. She became everything to me, emotionally, although I still kept a tough exterior. Our emotional intimacy was without barriers. We trusted each other."[1]
Acting career
Garnett and Topsy Jane moved to London together where she began to carve a career in television and film. Her roles included: Rosie in The Fanatics (1960); the rich young widow Dame Pliant in the television production of The Alchemist (1961) by Ben Jonson; Peggy in The Wind of Change (1961); Con in the TV movie Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring (1961); Céline in Maigret (1961); Stella Fairly in A Chance of Thunder (1961); in Shadow Play (1961); Amanda opposite Edith Evans in the BBC production of Time Remembered (1961) by Jean Anouilh; Mavis Wayne in Emergency Ward 10 (1962); Jane in Crying Down the Lane (1962), and Mona in Mix Me a Person (1962).[8]
She went on to play Shirley in Trevor (1964);[12] Jean Watts in John Paddington (1965), and Daphne Dawson in United! (1965).[8]
Illness
Tony Garnett, in his autobiography The Day the Music Died (2016), relates how Topsy Jane returned home several weeks after filming for Billy Liar commenced: "... unrecognisable. Fat, dishevelled, her hair lank, she walked and talked in slow motion. She only vaguely reminded me of my Topsy. I called Robin Fox, our agent, who said that John Schlesinger had sacked her and recast with Julie Christie because the camera could read nothing in Topsy. Her eyes were dead."[1] Her illness, from which she never fully recovered, seems to have been some form of schizophrenically-induced torpor[2] diagnosed as simple-type schizophrenia, dismissed by Garnett as a "dustbin diagnosis". The treatment for her illness was a "brutal regime" of electroconvulsive therapy and drugs[13] which produced a "functional lobotomy". They later divorced.[10] Her illness later inspired Garnett to make In Two Minds (1967), The Wednesday Play about schizophrenia.[3] In 2005 she was working behind the counter of a café in Liskeard in Cornwall.[14]
Topsy Jane Garnett née Legge died aged 75 on 4 January 2014 at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham of lung cancer. She had a private family funeral in Sutton Coldfield and was buried in Sutton New Hall Cemetery.[15] She was survived by her son, William, and a grandson.[7]
